Home / thoughtbot / rails-consultant · skills/prior-art/SKILL.md · GitHub

prior-art skillA

prior-art is agent-read markdown (skill) from thoughtbot/rails-consultant: Discover how a codebase already handles a specific concern — search broadly, find every instance, and assess consistency. The "how does this app do X?" tool..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

## Behavior

Research how this codebase handles `$ARGUMENTS`. Explore the codebase thoroughly and report what you find.

### Step 1: Search Broadly

Cast a wide net across the codebase. Use multiple search strategies:

- **Grep for keywords** — search for terms related to the concern (e.g. for error reporting: `error`, `exception`, `rescue`, `Sentry`, `Bugsnag`, `notify`, `report`)
- **Check common Rails locations** — initializers, middleware, concerns, base classes, config files, lib/
- **Check the Gemfile** — are there gems related to this concern? What do they tell you about the approach?
- **Check application-level base classes** — `ApplicationController`, `ApplicationRecord`, `ApplicationJob` — these often set patterns that everything inherits
- **Check for dedicated directories or files** — service objects, concerns, lib/ modules that handle this concern

Don't stop at the first result. The goal is to find every place this concern is handled — the consistent pattern and the exceptions.

### Step 2: Check Git History

For the key files involved in this concern:

- `git log --oneline -10 <file>` to see recent changes
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add thoughtbot/rails-consultant/prior-art@git:20260313.e2ed4a0
Exact content
mdr add thoughtbot/rails-consultant/prior-art@sha256:afebd194c2f5dcc0

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

Badge

mdr badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_sabeaadu6v4gumjy.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_sabeaadu6v4gumjy)

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Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260313.e2ed4a0 latest2026-03-13 e2ed4a0 3,968 BA view · diff
git:20260313.e9f29762026-03-13 e9f2976 3,966 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (3968 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

thoughtbot/rails-consultant · 26 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-18 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_sabeaadu6v4gumjy
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=thoughtbot/rails-consultant/prior-art
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/afebd194c2f5dcc0416715d2ac233a11148c23472ab47e4a4d2d560f4b8b98e8

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

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Every file in thoughtbot/rails-consultant

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